Careers at Umbrel

At Umbrel, we believe that everyone should be able to enjoy the convenience and benefits of the cloud, without giving up the ownership and control of their data.

To achieve our vision, we're building two things:

  • umbrelOS - A new kind of operating system for running a personal server.
  • Umbrel Home - A plug-and-play personal server (hardware device), powered by umbrelOS.

The personal computer revolution shifted computing from rooms full of computers (mainframes) to personal computers. The personal server revolution will shift computing from rooms full of servers (data centers) to personal servers.

We believe that over this decade, personal servers will become as ubiquitous as the internet routers today. And our goal is to power this shift by making an incredibly simple yet powerful operating system, and device, for running them.

Our most important work lies ahead of us, and you can be a part of it.

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What are some of the benefits of working at Umbrel?

  • 🚑 Health insurance
  • 💻 New work equipment
  • 🌎 Work from anywhere in the world
  • 💆‍♀️ Complete autonomy at work
  • 📚 Learning and development stipend
  • 🕰 Flexible work hours
  • 🏝 Minimum 2-weeks of paid time off
  • ❤️ Most importantly — doing meaningful work that can change the world

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What do you value at Umbrel?

  • Making users happy: Our decisions, intention, results, and motivation stem from trying to delight our users — from shitposting memes on Twitter to obsessing over micro-interactions in our product.
  • Asynchronous communication: Deep work requires large chunks of time so we try to communicate asynchronously to provide more time for deep work.
  • Results driven: We do what we promised each other, our users, community, and investors. While effort is recognized, it’s not regarded equally. We care about what we achieve.
  • Kindness: While being kind may not seem ruthlessly connected to outcomes, it does make work a lot more fun. We suspect that’s key to doing great work over a long period of time.
  • Speed: We believe speed is a competitive advantage as a startup. As startups get larger, they tend to get slower—we hope to decelerate that as much as possible. You should always be asking: “Could we do this faster?”

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Have you raised any money?

Yes, we raised $3m in our seed round. We’re fortunate to be backed by some of the world’s best investors, including Naval Ravikant, Joseph Jacks (OSS Capital), Sahil Lavingia (shl.vc), Sam Lessin (Slow Ventures), Anne Dwane (Village Global), Andreas Antonopoulos, Owen Gunden, Max Webster, Stephen Cole, and more.

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What’s the interview process like?

We’ll start with a quick video call to make sure we’re on the same page. After that, we’d love to chat with you in-depth regarding the specifics around the job position over another one or two video calls, followed by a quick and fun challenge or a task.

Next, our preferred situation is that we get to work together for 2 to 4 weeks on a project (of course, we’d pay you whatever you think is fair). Often working together for a bit is a great way to determine whether there’s a good match as future teammates and it can give you a lot of transparency.

We’re flexible with how much time you can allocate to the project and when you want to work on it. However, we understand that it’s not always possible for everyone, so we’re open to figuring something else out in such case.

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What are you looking for in candidates?

Talent, passion, genuine love for your craft, and the desire to do meaningful work. What we’re not looking for: credentials and degrees. When you really love what you do, work feels like play. And when work feels like play, you become the best at it. That’s what we’re looking for.

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Where is Umbrel located?

Our headquarters are on the internet, we do not have any physical office anywhere. We’re a fully remote team spread across the world, and there’s no bias towards a particular timezone or geographical coordinates.

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What’s the technical stack that you’re working on?

umbrelOS is built on Debian. Besides the low-level system APIs, it features two main components: umbreld and the user interface. umbreld is powered by Node.js, and the user interface is built with React. The stack utilizes Tailwind, tRPC and TypeScript. You can view the' source code on our GitHub.

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What is work/life balance like at Umbrel?

All of us enjoy complete freedom to create our own work schedules and work from anywhere in the world. Most of our team communication is async. You wont find endless Zoom calls or full calendars here. Just a calm, creative group of humans enjoying challenging problems at the intersection of art and technology.

As a result of being an early-stage startup, we wouldn’t want to hide this reality from you: raw hours make a big difference on the impact we can make right now. This won’t always be the case, but it is at present. So we often find ourselves working later on in the evenings and sometimes on weekends, but it’s mostly driven by personal ambition. We don’t have any expectations from anyone to do so.

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Looking for a role that isn't listed below?

Or feel like you don’t meet 100% of the requirements? Remember: you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Plus, we’d like to account for the fact that we may have overlooked, under-counted, or over-indexed on some of these requirements.

So don’t be shy to slide into our inbox and hit us up at jobs@umbrel.com. We’re always looking for passionate people to join us.